Bulletin #1 1986
KULTCHA: THE ISSUE OF KULTCHA AND THE CULTURAL ISSUE
These days, everybody wants to talk about culture - particularly when it
is related to diverse issues such as Religion, sex or whether a given
painting or flower arrangement is subversive.
That there are a lot of cryptic symbolism in the arts (and in ads,
political speeches etc.) is onlt symptomatic that censorship is a reality
which has driven politics into the cultural realm in cases where politics
has not simply chosen to invade.
That the arts are an excellent forum for spreading political ideas while
sidestepping the boredom associated with blatant propaganda is
recognized by anarchists as it was by Maso Tse-tung.
Even Mao, though, wrote beautiful apolitical poetry -- contrary in
practice to his urging that "all our art" express the proletarian line.
Without the State there would be no politics; it would be the "end of
history." Culture would endure.
The statist socialist and Objectivist capitalist contention that culture
should be dominated by political goals -- as in Socialist Realism and
Romantic Realism -- conditions people to think there is no culture or
society without government. It contracidts liberty as harshly as the
bourgeois notionthat culture should never be contaminated with socially
relevant criticism.
In a world with hundreds of cultures there is, however, a far more
pertinent problem: how to ignore cultural differences in order to cooperate
in political struggle.
When Lawrence of Arabia first began organizing desert tribes he told
them they were "a silly people" for quarreling about customs instead of
uniting against the Turks.
In reading Fanon I was most impressed by the similarities in problems
African cultures face struggling against colonial cultural values to those
encountered here in the U.S. by the counter culture against the same
imperialism.
I feel like telling the people who always want to change the subject
from genocidal racism to religious theories and sexual lifestyle disputes
that they asked for this.
This is KULTCHA: Dedicated to Dylan Thomas -- whoever he was.
ORGANIZE